Re: Speed up installation: activate eatmydata-udeb by default and include eatmydata package in /pool
2021-04-06 17:41 GMT-04:00, Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>:
> Indeed. But a fresh install is not critical information. If you lost
> power during installation you'll want to restart over anyway.
>
> Its name is there for people to indeed not think that it's a magic wand
> that makes everything faster. It makes it faster at the expense of not
> protecting it from power loss. But here the half-installed system is
> moot anyway, we do not care that the dpkg database is coherent, we'll
> want to start over anyway.
It do makes sense to start over the installation if there were a
power failure.
2021-04-06 17:46 GMT-04:00, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
> The only time eatmydata does any harm is if the system looses power or
> resets during the install since the data isn't constantly flushed to disk
> to maintain a consistent state.
Thanks for this clarification,
I know understand better the risk.
> During an install, there is nothing of
> value on the system yet, so doing everything as quickly as possible and
> then when everything is done, then you issue a sync command to ensure
> everything is flushed to disk saves a ton of time with no risk at all
> (in fact since the install takes less time, the changes of a power
> interruption happening during the install is lowered).
>
> In no way does eatmydata make it possible for the data of the resulting
> install to be corrupt. As long as the filesystem is cleanly unmounted
> or flushed before you reset, you are fine. That should already happen
> by the fact the install does a clean reboot at the end.
>
> Using it on a normal system is a different story since anything you modify
> while using it could be lost in case the system is reset unexpectedly,
> but since the install has no user data, there is nothing to risk.
>
> So when the page says to not use when you care about the data, that
> is correct. But a fresh install is entirely made of stuff you don't
> care about, until it is completely done, then you care. Using it for
> running testsuites where everything is just temporary data also makes
> sense to speed that up. If you are editing something real, don't use it.
>
> --
> Len Sorensen
>
Ok. Thanks Mr. Thibault and Mr. Sorensen. I now understand
what is this proposal about.
Just some little questions, I'm still in doubt:
What would happen if you were installing Debian to dual-boot
with another OS?
What would happen if you were repartitioning the disk
with some other stuff in it? ...
and suddenly, your PC had a power loss.
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